but met with horror and punishment by the broader “football industry”

Only when they were forced to do something abut it by public opinion. The people who were trying to bring the case to trial were widely excoriated by the student body, school officials and football fans.

It’s the same with MMA vs. traditional boxing. Bareknuckle cage fighters bleed and bruise, whereas gloved boxers become permanently mentally debilitated. People may not like to see blood, but in reality being pounded repeatedly in the head with a padded glove or a helmet, which is what happens when you add a lot of padding to a full-contact sport, is about the worst thing you can do person.

Wikipedia seems to back this up, but without citations:

Collisions between players in American football tend to cause greater injury than in rugby union; in rugby union tackles must at least show an attempt to bind is made but this rule does not apply to American football. Moreover, rugby union hits are not usually at the speed of American football both because of the nature of the game and the lack of protective equipment. Additionally, rugby offsides rules and the lack of a forward pass significantly reduce the chance of a player receiving a “blind-side” hit (i.e. being hit and/or tackled from behind). In American football, players receiving a forward pass are often extremely vulnerable because they must concentrate on catching the ball, often jumping very high or stretching out and thereby exposing their body to punishing hits; in rugby a player is not allowed to be tackled in the air, leaving the receiver of the kick with more time to assess his surroundings, usually in rugby ball carriers can anticipate a hit and can brace themselves accordingly.

In rugby, the contact times between players are usually much longer, as a more wrestling approach is required to bring players down, as momentum cannot always be relied upon particularly when the lines between the teams are consistently close, not allowing for significant momentum to be developed before meeting a defender.

(Sorry for the stretched Discuss formatting…)

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/junior-seau-is-dead/256664/

The reason you see injuries on the rise is because coaches actually teach “proper” hitting technique to drop your head and use your full body as leverage.  This puts your spine in perfect alignment to compress when you hit; great for full-body tackles, but nasty for spinal compression and brain/neck injuries. 

The problem is endemic.  It’s not just the NFL teaching this, it’s high school coaches as well.  If you’re a football player, you learn the fundamentals from high school onward (minimum), so every stage of non-professional-to-professional football will, at varying levels, teach this form of tackling.  Usually there’s not a lot of industry pressure at the lower high school and collegiate levels to avoid this problem, because injuries won’t show up until later down the road.  The industry pressures are building, but the question is how to disperse proper injury prevention technique / padding / monitoring techniques throughout the sport.  A $20,000 head trauma monitoring machine cheaper than a sneeze’s worth of advertising for the NFL, but for a high school football team, that’s likely more than the coach makes all year.

I will be worried knowing that across the country, hundreds of thousands of men and boys who won’t ever get a scholarship or a paycheck will be killing themselves to live for one moment of gridiron glory. …. And yet, I will still watch.

How is it ethical to continue watching when this entertainment drives these kids to damage their brains? The NFL hasn’t done enough. The NFL needs to do everything it can to minimize brain damage in the sport and then communicate that to the colleges and high schools.